ES Chapter 3

To make matters worse, it had been raining since dawn.

With both hands already occupied by two oversized suitcases, there had been no possibility of an umbrella. Ayesha boarded the shared carriage soaked through.

"Excuse me—could you move in just a little? I'm sorry, I have rather a lot of luggage."

The passengers drew their legs in as one, skirts and hems pulled clear of the suitcases still dripping onto the floor. Each time Ayesha caught another passenger's eye, she offered a small apologetic nod.

A shared carriage in the rain had its own smell—the scent of raw dampness and wet cloth, intimate with the interior and staying. The thick curtains hung around the windows to keep out the driving rain were soaked through already, and the cold damp moved through the fabric without announcing itself, working its way up the back of her neck in a slow insidious crawl until she kept pulling her shoulders forward without deciding to.

The rain came down without stopping, beating the roof with a relentless percussion that had settled a blunted, stuffed quality in her ears that wouldn't clear.

A miserable assignment, from the very first day.

"Come over here, miss."

She was also, it turned out, the passenger traveling farthest. Every time people got on and off at their stops, Ayesha was jostled—her and her heavy suitcases together. One of the women took pity on her, because the moment an inner seat opened up, she gestured.

Ayesha gathered her suitcase and moved quickly.

"Put your bag here—it won't be in anyone's way."

The woman had cleared the edge of the bench. Ayesha settled in and gave a small dip of her head.

"Thank you."

"Soaked right through, aren't you. You'll catch something if you don't get a warm cup of tea into you. Oh, dear."

"I know. I had no idea it would come down this hard."

"Odd weather for the season. And right before the harvest, too—the fields will be in a state. But your accent—I don't recognize it from around here. You've traveled some distance?"

"Yes, from the south."

"I thought as much. Are you traveling alone? How far are you going?"

The journey seemed to stretch without limit, and the woman appeared to find it less so with conversation. She directed herself at Ayesha steadily, without stopping.

'If she named Langfield Manor as her destination, the question of what her business there was would follow within seconds.'

Langfield Manor was the Etheldore family's ancestral seat—old, distinguished, well-known throughout the region. Going there under false pretenses to run a deception on one of the most prominent families in the area was not something she needed discussed. Ayesha gave the general area rather than the specific address.

"Worsley."

"Worsley?"

The woman had already been watching her. Now she watched harder.

"Are you one of those, then, miss? A spiritualist?"

"...I beg your pardon?"

A direct hit. For a moment, Ayesha nearly lost her expression.

'Wait, what? Wasn't this supposed to be top secret? He was whispering in my ear like he’d bagged the scoop of the century, and it turns out the story is already stone-cold—stale as last week's bread. And he expects an exclusive out of that?'

She should have held out and refused to go. She hadn't even arrived yet and she already regretted it entirely—picturing it, all of it: Langfield Manor already descended upon by every stripe of riffraff and fraud, a sea of nobodies waving mirrors and little bells and putting on a performance of communing with the dead, herself obliged to join that queue in exactly the same state.

The space behind her eyes went dark.

"A spiritualist? Me?"

Something cold had gone down her spine. She feigned ignorance and held it there.

"Don't go bothering the girl with that. She's not even from here—don't say things you shouldn't."

The woman's companion, seated nearby, gave her a quiet reproving look.

"I haven't said anything that isn't true—every outsider passing through Worsley these days is one of them, which is why I asked. And why else would those sorts of people come to Worsley, when you think about it?"

The woman had dropped her voice, pitched just below carrying.

"It's all because of Langfield Manor, isn't it. If there's anywhere in this area a genuine ghost might turn up, that's the place."

"That was thirty years ago and more. Old business—why bring it up."

"Old business, but the whole situation seems strange again, doesn't it. A new lord takes over and spiritualists start quietly turning up in Worsley almost at once. Something's in that house. There is definitely something there."

"Well—there's always been something wrong there. I don't think anyone around here would be surprised if a genuine ghost appeared. My great-aunt worked in that house for twelve years. She ran out after that day and never went back."

The companion had not contradicted any of it. If anything, she seemed more unsettled than the one who had raised the subject in the first place.

'That day...'

Ayesha tilted her head slightly.

'Something happened thirty years ago that still hasn't managed to sink into the mud and stay there. Whatever it was, it wasn't ordinary—not if people who grew up near it still held it this uneasily.'

Her resentment toward the editor who had shoved her onto this assignment against her stated objections was a separate matter from the fact that her professional instincts had, without permission, started moving. Whatever was happening at Langfield Manor lately, these women clearly found it suspicious too.

"Langfield Manor—you mean House Etheldore? What about it?"

Watching the two women carefully, Ayesha slipped herself into the conversation. She arranged her expression deliberately into guilelessness—open, unclouded, nothing riding on the answers.

"You're definitely not from here, are you. Didn't know a thing. The story will only give you bad dreams and a foul mood—don't trouble yourself about it."

"Ah—but actually, I was planning to stop at Langfield Manor when I reached Worsley, to see if they needed help on a short-term basis. I sometimes pick up temporary work along the way to help cover travel costs."

She had thought of it quickly. She gave nothing away.

"They won't take on short-term help there, I'd think. They only hire people temporarily when there's a party—and Langfield Manor hasn't held any sort of gathering in something like thirty years. You'd be wasting the journey."

"Though you never know—there's a new lord now, so perhaps there'll be some kind of reception."

The two women murmured between themselves. Ayesha tried again, keeping it light.

"Now that you mention it, I did read in the papers that the Etheldore estate had a change of lord. What sort of person is the new one?"

Both women shook their heads.

"We wouldn't know."

"We're only tenants. There's no occasion for the likes of us to see the lord."

The Etheldore family's insularity was something she had been told to expect—but having nothing to pass on even to the people on their own estate was unusual. For people living the same quiet, repetitive daily life, the movements of the family that owned their land were ordinarily the most interesting subject available. Collecting and publishing exactly that kind of gossip was the entire business of Ayesha's magazine.

'In her experience, there were generally two reasons why people wouldn't speak. Either the household staff were so tightly managed that nothing escaped to the outside—or the internal situation was complicated enough that it couldn't be touched casually.'

Given the quiet, barely-there tension the two women had been letting through, House Etheldore was almost certainly the second.

"What about the previous lord, then—before this one?"

'However many secrets the house kept, she needed something to go on before she walked in. A reputation. A physical description. Something.'

'They're family—there'd be some resemblance. If she could establish the father's appearance, she might work out what the new lord looked like.'

She had asked with this in mind. The women shook their heads again.

"We don't know."

"Even if there's no occasion in ordinary life—wouldn't he come out for the village festival, or the harvest inspections?"

"No—there was always a representative, but the previous lord himself never came outside. He simply never left the estate. Not once, as far as anyone knew."

"He stayed inside? For decades?"

"He may have gone out in disguise on occasion, I suppose. But he never appeared publicly, not once."

Ayesha's eyes went wide.

'That's practically confinement. No matter how vast Langfield Manor is—for a person, even a lord, to stay so thoroughly inside, and for no one to find it strange?'

Even for the most dedicated recluse, this was too much. She could not make sense of the previous lord's conduct.

'How does that work. That's abandoning an entire estate. Don't they collect taxes here. What if there's a dispute between tenants and they need a—'

The questions had reached all the way up to her throat.

A sharp hup—and she bit her lips inward, hiding the sound.

There were cases, she knew, where people quietly permitted someone's confinement.

When the mind had gone badly wrong.

"They say no one in that family ever comes to any real age in one piece. Either they die young—or they go mad."